The Virginian

Thursday, February 27, 2014

"Holding the view that Obama had when he was elected in 2008 is now hateful and bigoted."

The way people look at things and react today is just absurd. I've commented on this a few times, and it always bears repeating.

Black pride is always laudable and heroic. White pride is always horrific and racist. Celebrating black culture is diverse and cool. Celebrating white culture is lame, pathetic, suspicious. Whiteness is portrayed as a sign of shame: he's so white. White influences and culture are thought of as at best dull and probably destructive, oppressive, and awful.

Homosexuality is heroic, noble, good, and fun. Gay people are smarter, better dressed, wiser, and funnier. You didn't know that? Watch some TV and a few movies, and you'll get your head on straight. That's the lesson we're taught. Straight people are neurotic, silly, confused, slovenly, and need their magic homo mentor to straighten them out. Being glad you are not homosexual means you're probably secretly queer

When you're part of the Obama Administration, fresh from publishing the Virginian Pilot, and being used to telling people what to do, a little thing like the law doesn't stop you.

An internal federal probe has concluded that Maurice Jones, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s new commerce secretary, improperly lobbied Congress while he was in the Obama administration last year.

Mr. Jones, who was a deputy secretary at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, sent an email to more than 1,000 recipients — including 46 people at HUD — asking them to contact senators to “defend against efforts by some Republicans” to prevent a housing bill to come up for a vote, according to the internal probe. The message also asked “friends and supporters” to tell senators to vote “no” on another amendment.

A monthslong investigation by the HUD’s office of inspector general concluded that Mr. Jones and four others at HUD appear to have violated anti-lobbying laws, which restrict the use of funds for publicity or propaganda directed at pending legislation before Congress. The probe also concluded that Mr. Jones violated internal HUD policy on lobbying by federal employees.

Jones claimed ignorance.

“[Deputy secretary]{Jones} stated that it was articulated to him that ‘I could do things that others could not,’” investigators wrote in the report obtained by The Washington Times.

Laws are for the little people.

The Obama DOJ - the most politicized in history - declined to prosecute its own employee. and the investigation is busy being swept under the rug. I confidently predict that Jones will not be prosecuted.

One last point, this tireless advocate of the working man, managed to do very well for himself even as he was throwing others out of work.

In 2012, The Washington Times reported that a federal financial disclosure form showed Mr. Jones pocketed more than a quarter-million dollars in bonus compensation as publisher of the Virginian-Pilot about the same time he was slashing newsroom jobs.

The Virginian Pilot did not cover this story. But then they have a history of refusing to cover the mishaps of their own employees, even when those employees are the victims of an unprovoked attack by a gang of black youths.

They speak like Marx, rule like Stalin, live like the Rockefellers while the people suffer.

Monday, February 24, 2014

On March 9, 2010, around 10 a.m., I announced my plans to run for senate representing Delaware.

Later that same day, my office received a call from a reporter asking about my taxes.

It’s since come out, after a halting and unenthusiastic investigation, that a Delaware Department of Revenue employee named David Smith accessed my records that day at approximately 2 p.m. — out of curiosity, he says.

That these records ended up in the hands of the press is just a coincidence, the IRS claims.

To add insult to injury, the tax records given to the reporters weren’t even accurate. I had never fallen behind on my taxes, and a supposed tax lien was on a house I no longer owned.

The lien was highly publicized and used as political ammunition by my political opponents. The IRS later withdrew the lien and blamed it on a computer glitch but, at that point, the damage — and the invasion of my privacy — was done.

I wasn’t the only one preyed upon by the IRS, of course. The agency admits to targeting conservative nonprofits, asking them for membership lists and other data not required while delaying their tax-exempt status. And opponents of President Obama have been subjected to audits soon after criticizing the administration.

What we all have in common: no answers.

In January 2013, a US Treasury Department special agent told me that my tax records were compromised and misused. That was three years after my campaign. Now, in the 12 months since, no one has been called to testify, no more answers given.

Read the whole thing. It turns out that two congressional Democrats - Congressmen Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.) and Matthew Cartwright (D-Pa.) - are working hard to make sure that the truth is never told.

When my mother was diagnosed with carcinoid cancer in 2005, when she was 49, it came as a lightning shock. Her mother, at 76, had yet to go gray, and her mother's mother, at 95, was still playing bingo in her nursing home. My mother had always been, despite her diminutive frame, a titanic and irrepressible force of vitality and love. She had given birth to me and my nine younger siblings, and juggled kids, home and my father's medical practice with humor and grace for three decades. She swam three times a week in the early mornings, ate healthily and never smoked....

Carcinoid, a form of neuroendocrine cancer, is a terminal disease but generally responds well to treatment by Sandostatin, a drug that slows tumor growth and reduces (but does not eliminate) the symptoms of fatigue, nausea and gastrointestinal dysfunction. My mother received a painful shot twice a month and often couldn't sit comfortably for days afterward.

As with most cancers, one thing led to another. There have been several more surgeries, metastases, bone deterioration, a terrible bout of thyroiditis (an inflammation of the thyroid gland), and much more. But my mother has kept fighting, determined to make the most of life, no matter what it brings. She has an indomitable will and is by far the toughest person I've ever met. But she wouldn't still be here without that semimonthly Sandostatin shot that slows the onslaught of her disease.

And then in November, along with millions of other Americans, she lost her health insurance. She'd had a Blue Cross/Blue Shield plan for nearly 20 years. It was expensive, but given that it covered her very expensive treatment, it was a terrific plan. It gave her access to any specialist or surgeon, and to the Sandostatin and other medications that were keeping her alive.

And then, because our lawmakers and president thought they could do better, she had nothing. Her old plan, now considered illegal under the new health law, had been canceled.

Because the exchange website in her state (Virginia) was not working, she went directly to insurers' websites and telephoned them, one by one, over dozens of hours. As a medical-office manager, she had decades of experience navigating the enormous problems of even our pre-ObamaCare system. But nothing could have prepared her for the bureaucratic morass she now had to traverse.

The repeated and prolonged phone waits were Sisyphean, the competence and customer service abysmal. When finally she found a plan that looked like it would cover her Sandostatin and other cancer treatments, she called the insurer, Humana, HUM +5.62% to confirm that it would do so. The enrollment agent said that after she met her deductible, all treatments and medications—including those for her cancer—would be covered at 100%. Because, however, the enrollment agents did not—unbelievable though this may seem—have access to the "coverage formularies" for the plans they were selling, they said the only way to find out in detail what was in the plan was to buy the plan. (Does that remind you of anyone?)

With no other options, she bought the plan and was approved on Nov. 22. Because by January the plan was still not showing up on her online Humana account, however, she repeatedly called to confirm that it was active. The agents told her not to worry, she was definitely covered.

Then on Feb. 12, just before going into (yet another) surgery, she was informed by Humana that it would not, in fact, cover her Sandostatin, or other cancer-related medications. The cost of the Sandostatin alone, since Jan. 1, was $14,000, and the company was refusing to pay.

The news was dumbfounding. This is a woman who had an affordable health plan that covered her condition. Our lawmakers weren't happy with that because . . . they wanted plans that were affordable and covered her condition. So they gave her a new one. It doesn't cover her condition and it's completely unaffordable....

The "Affordable" Care Act is a brutal, Procrustean disaster. In principle, it violates the irreducible particularity of human life, and in practice it will cause many individuals to suffer and die. We can do better, and we must.

Once I finished reading this article, I was outraged ... for two reasons.

First, ObamaCare is barely off the ground and already we are learning that the infamous Death Panels are a reality.

The second reason is that the woman with cancer is a resident of Virginia Beach, but this is the first I've heard about it. America’s news media are as much to blame for this fiasco as the Democrats in office. Why do I have to read about this in the Wall Street Journal, published in New York? I reside in the Virginia Beach area and the leading area newspaper, the Virginian Pilot, has long been a vigorous advocate of ObamaCare. Not a word about this woman’s situation has appeared in the local press. In fact, the Virginian Pilot has not bothered to do any stories about the way ObamaCare has affected local residents even though thousands of stories like this have appeared nationally and on the Internet. It just doesn’t fit their narrative.

As Glenn Reynolds says, the MSM are Democrat Operatives with Bylines.

UPDATE: The American media, by acting as unpaid propagandists for the Obama regime has its counterpart in Ukraine as John Fund explains. There, the Inter network is the main TV organ. When protests broke out in Kiev and elsewhere in Ukraine, Inter gave the people government propaganda. And finally things took a turn on a live broadcast that could not be edited when a brave reporter told the truth.

Reporter Halya Coynash points to the Yanukovych regime’s record of media control and censorship: “It proved unnervingly easy within a matter of months of Yanukovych’s [2010] election to remove most critical analysis, negative reports about those in power, and inconvenient information from television.” Whatever new government is formed, that sorry record must not be repeated in a new Ukraine.

It proved unnervingly easy to create a news media in America that is the willing handmaid of the regime. The American media fell in love with the Obama image and has stayed smitten despite economic failure, foreign policy disasters, horrible war losses, and the weaponization of government agencies like the DOJ, IRS, CIA, DHS, and the FBI to destroy or stifle the political opposition. And now they cover up the disaster that is the hallmark of the Liberal dream: ObamaCare.

What were they thinking?

The FCC said they were backing off their investigation of America's newsrooms ... not because the MSM put up a fuss, but because the blogosphere, some at FOX News and Rush Limbaugh raised a fuss and that way many in the public heard about it.

So what were they thinking? The government agency like the FCC does not commission a study for no reason. the reason for this one is obvious: to establish the need for government control of editorial and news content in the media. To suggest otherwise it to insult our intelligence.

As for the MSM? They stopped being a news gathering operation a long time ago. Today they are simply political partisans on the side of the Left. They are not worried about Team Obama imposing new rules on the media because they figure it will only affect those who oppose Obama's polices, and they're good with that.

Some in the media who bother to notice, like Howard Kurtz, wonder what they were thinking. I can't imagine that he's really asking that question because it's obvious. So he's pretending to be stupid.

“What are they thinking?” Mr. Kurtz, it’s pretty obvious; they’re thinking no one in the mainstream press has asked them a difficult or challenging question in 7 years, so why would they start now.

They’re thinking an obsequious press that couldn’t be bothered to sustain outrage over intrusions into its own phone and internet records won’t have a problem with the government parking itself into the newsroom.

They’re thinking that if the mainstream press could forgive them for considering espionage charges against a member of the press — for doing what reporters are supposed to do — and then re-commence their habitual boot-licking, there is no real risk of media folk suddenly calling out a “red line”, or even being able to identify one.

They know that half the people in the newsroom are either married to (or social buddies with) influential members of this government, and that everyone is all comfy and nicely settled in for the revolution.

They know that the press willfully surrendered its own freedoms some time ago, in the interests of ideology, and so they really won’t mind a little editorial supervision from the masters:

What's surprising is that - with the supine acquiescence of the MSM, the FCC still backed down. Barack Obama obviously needs to have a talk with his FCC Commissioner.

Friday, February 21, 2014

It appears, per Bud Norman, that with the exception of FOX News and the editorial pages of the Wall street Journal, the MSM really isn't bothered by the FCC's announcement that they're going to be checking up on what stories are being reported and how they are covered. Well, when your already the organ of the ruling party, that doesn't bother you.

The Fox New Network is on the story, possibly because they’re the ones whose reporters have treated as criminal co-conspirators and excluded from the White House news pool and routinely criticized by every level of the administration, and the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page and the radio talk shows have been paying some attention for obvious reasons of their own, but otherwise the story has gone largely unnoted. In our years of journalism we endured many a journalist’s self-righteous sermon about the obligation of the press to bravely resist any governmental interference, but that was mostly during Republican administrations, when nothing like the FCC’s current curiosity and the nation’s slide down the rankings of press freedom ever occurred, and at this moment of hope and change none of the over-the-air networks seem terribly concerned that their notions of the news consumers’ critical information needs will differ much from the government’s.

If proof is needed that the MSM is composed of Democrats with bylines, this is all the proof you really need. A watchdog doesn't growl at his master.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Nothing lives there because Leftism is not a political philosophy or a way of thinking; it is a social mechanism for enforcing uniformity of opinion, and a psychological mechanism for accusing others of one’s own flaws in order to award oneself unearned moral superiority.

Think the Leftist superstitions of Climate Change, Multiculturalism, Diversity, Free Speech (for me but not for thee), Sexism, Feminism, Separation of Church and State (so religion has to be stamped out of the public sphere). It is the Empire of Lies.

Week after week, Republicans on Capitol Hill have ratcheted up their drumbeat of discontent with the Internal Revenue Service, alleging that it targeted conservative groups and can’t be trusted. Six investigations are underway, ensuring the matter will drag on for months or years.

But there is a bigger question about America’s least-loved federal agency that barely gets asked: Is the IRS, which collects 90 percent of the nation’s revenue, up to the basics of its job? The surprising answer is that it often is not.

A Globe review of dozens of government reports and audits, as well as interviews with key officials, found a series of fundamental problems:

The IRS makes billions of dollars in potentially fraudulent payments because it lacks the ability to check whether many returns are accurate before refunds are mailed.

And these same people are the gatekeepers to your health. The IRS is in charge of ObamaCare.

The family that has to choose between feeding their children or being able to drive to work and heat their home is not a talking point; they are the new Kulaks, the victims of an ideological activist policy that is killing innocent people for the Green greater good of the environment.

Stalin killed millions to industrialize the Soviet Union, the Green Left is preparing to kill millions to deindustrialize North America, Europe and Australia. It's already doing it. While its activists are trying to peg the blame for fuel poverty fatalities on a government which is badly out of cash, it need look no further than its own activists and celebrities who preach the green life from their mansions.

Obama has said "We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times and then just expect that other countries are going to say ok.

That doesn't mean Obama can't heat the White House at 72 degrees or Hawaii level temperatures. It means that you can't do it. That's what fuel poverty really means. It means you have to freeze and if you die, then the community organizers of tomorrow will use your corpse as a prop in their ghoulish protests outside energy companies which have to not only cover all the clean energy boondoggles, but also take the blame for passing on the costs.

I'd Like Your Vote

The Washington Free Beacon rounds on the jerks in the MSM who are lined up to anoint St. Hillary as the next and final President. Excerpt. Read the whole thing.

As far as Bill and Hillary Clinton are concerned, the media’s horizon of expectations is stunningly narrow. It encompasses on the one hand the belief that the “secretary of explaining stuff” is a national treasure beyond reproach, and on the other hand the expectation that the former secretary of state will be our next president. Stories that fall outside of this horizon are problematized, scrutinized, ascribed to partisanship, and read with the sort of incredulity reporters are supposed to apply to public figures such as the Clintons.

When the Free Beacon published “The Hillary Papers” last Sunday night, we knew the story would have to cross a high bar. The piece was scrupulously fact-checked. All of the documents we cited were loaded onto the Internet. Every effort was made to present as straightforwardly as possible the contents of the papers, which show Hillary Clinton as hardheaded, calculating, and, yes, ruthless. (Re-read the part where she axes a Supreme Court appointment out of spite.)

What I did not expect was that the media would undergo such a tortured and dramatic breakdown, would struggle so laboriously to acknowledge the scoop while schizophrenically downplaying its importance. That a conservative online newspaper could have understood the significance of the archive, and actually examined its public contents, seemed too much an embarrassment for the staffs of the major newspapers and networks and magazines to bear. By being the first to report on the papers, the Free Beacon exposed the inanity and irrelevance of the mainstream media. We beat them. And they are sore losers.

And yet: Even as the Victorian gentlemen of the press debated the newsworthiness and propriety of the Free Beacon scoop, even as some of the most prominent correspondents in America publicly stated that the story was beneath contempt and unworthy of notice, reporters and producers were booking flights to Fayetteville to see what else they could find inside the Diane Blair archive.

Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Mark Steyn on the blindness of the "Official Jews" who are still fighting the last war and are afraid to identify their real enemies.

When my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the "human rights" commissions began up north, I quickly learned something my comrade Ezra Levant was already well up to speed on - that Canada's "official Jews" (as he calls them) were among the most useless people on the planet. Under Bernie Farber, for example, the Canadian Jewish Congress was obsessive about the last three neo-Nazi losers living in their mum's basement and contributing unread blog posts to obscure "white supremacist" websites. But it had nothing to say about the broad-daylight mass Jew-hatred and, indeed, brazen incitement to murder of large groups of people parading through downtown Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Farber & Co were cardboard warriors, capable only of fighting the battles others had already won long ago.

In the US, it's Abe Foxman.

Paris 2012: Jewish parents and teachers try to determine whether it's safe for pupils to leave the school on the day four Jews are killed in Toulouse by one of Abe Foxman's "anti-government, anti-immigration, neo-Nazi nationalists" - or, as his friends call him, Mohammed.

And so it goes for America's "official Jews":

Anti-Defamation League chief Abe Foxman believes that anti-Semitism is at its height since the Holocaust, and threatens the lives of Jews all around the world.

He got that right. He got everything else wrong:

"Europe is where the Jewish people have paid the highest price for anti-Semitism, and it's sort of an old-new phenomenon," he said, defining it as "nationalists, anti-government people, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis of anti-immigration and anti-government coming together with a glue and cement of anti-Semitism. I think it's a serious threat to Jewish life."

Is it really possible in 2014 even for the capo di tutti capi of official Jews to be so blind? Foxman is either the most wicked dissembler or, to be more charitable, he reflects merely the blinkered parochialism of America's liberal Jewish elites. Unlike the head of the ADL, I have no special interest in or responsibility for the welfare of the Jewish people, but I have been to Toulouse, Antwerp, Malmö and the old Jewish East End of London, and I know what I have seen there.

How did global warming discussions end up hinging on what's happening with polar bears, unverifiable predictions of what will happen in a hundred years, and whether people are "climate deniers" or "global warming cultists?" If this is a scientific topic, why aren't we spending more time discussing the science involved? Why aren't we talking about the evidence and the actual data involved? Why aren't we looking at the predictions that were made and seeing if they match up to the results? If this is such an open and shut case, why are so many people who care about science skeptical? Many Americans have long since thought that the best scientific evidence available suggested that man wasn't causing any sort of global warming. However, now, we can go even further and suggest that the planet isn't warming at all.

Read the whole thing, but here are the five heads:

1) There hasn't been any global warming since 19972) There is no scientific consensus that global warming is occurring and caused by man3) Arctic ice is up 50% since 20124) Climate models showing global warming have been wrong over and over5) Predictions about the impact of global warming have already been proven wrong

Obama's Stimulus: The promise vs. The Reality

There was a warm rush of nostalgia, however, as we recalled the giddy optimism that attended President Barack Obama’s lavishly ceremonial signing of the law. We were told that the law would cost a mere $800 billion, already a insignificant sum by Washington standards, and yet keep the unemployment rate from topping 8 percent and bring it down to 5 percent by 2013 with “shovel-ready jobs” while lifting two million Americans out of poverty and saving the world from global warming by creating a new “green energy” industry. Since then the cost has grown to $2 trillion, the unemployment rate hit 10.1 percent and stayed above 8 percent for four years before enough people finally gave up looking for a job to push it down to the current 6.6 percent, the poverty rate has risen to a 50 year high, the president has joked that the shovel-ready jobs were “not as shovel-ready as we expected,” and the “green jobs” that survived the bankruptcies of the subsidized companies turned out to cost about $5 million apiece. This winter’s wicked weather suggests some success in combating global warming, but otherwise an objective observer might reasonably conclude that all the optimism seems have been unfounded.

One wonders, were they lies all along or is this the result of incompetence? Even into the second term of the Worst President Ever, we really don't know.

Monday, February 17, 2014

As a follow up to the shooting in the Military Circle Mall by a black mob, I ran across an essay by Daniel Greenfield (Sultan Knish) "Our state of Police" which analyzes the situation from an interesting perspective.

I'm disturbed about the increasing militarization of the police. It's a poor police force indeed that does hot have a SWAT Team and one or more mini-tanks and heavy weapons. But, as Greenfield points out, we're not living in a police state. Not yet.

But when the story about what's actually happening in places like the Military Circle Mall - which gets out via the grapevine or via news reports like WND despite the Virginian Pilot's attempts to keep the public in the dark - you want the police to intervene; to stop rampant thuggery by gangs of thugs.

And why is the lone cop not enough to prevent this? Here's the brutal truth:

In the United States, it's not the populations that drift in and out of jail who find the police terrifying, but those who don't. There is no police state for the former. The middle class citizen looks warily through the window of his home like the bars of a cage but when the cop car drives through a bad neighborhood, it's the police officers inside who feel like they are in a cage. The police state is about control and our state of police exists to control the areas that are becoming uncontrollable.

These gangs are not afraid of the police, the police are afraid of the gangs. And it's more than the fact that they are out numbered. The people who make up these gangs, and their parents, grandparents and friends represent a powerful political constituency and they have their own representative on city council who will quickly accuse the police of racism if they try to establish some rules.

What we have is a problem of failed societies, both at home and abroad. Some of these societies encompass entire countries while others are limited to a city or a neighborhood. In these places the social contract has broken down. The only thing that keeps the people living in them from killing each other is the threat of naked force, the vendetta and the lynch mob and honor and shame.

The welfare state created the gangs and the rest of the community responded by enabling the welfare state while also increasing the power of the police. Its a self-reinforcing cycle that will end, but we don't know where.

WND has courage. This kind of reporting will get them branded as racists by white Liberals.

(Editor’s note: Colin Flaherty has done more reporting than any other journalist on what appears to be a nationwide trend of skyrocketing black-on-white crime, violence and abuse. WND features these reports to counterbalance the virtual blackout by the rest of the media due to their concerns that reporting such incidents would be inflammatory or even racist. WND considers it racist not to report racial abuse solely because of the skin color of the perpetrators or victims.)

I read about a shooting it the Military Circle Mall in the Virginian Pilot. If was a sanitized version.

Some were surprised to hear about the black mob violence on Valentine’s Day at Victoria’s Secret in Norfolk, Va.

Not at the violence: The Galleria at Military Circle has been the site of dozens of episodes of racial lawlessness over the last two years, most of which has gone unreported in the local newspaper.

The surprise is that this mall is still open. Most of its major tenants are gone or leaving – Sears, J.C. Penney’s, the nearby DoubleTree also closed. The big draw there now is a movie theater with cheap tickets.

More than 25 percent of the space is vacant. DeadMalls.com says the mall is a “zombie” that is really dead but just acts alive.

The latest example of black mob violence at the mall came on Valentine’s Day. A large group of people fought in the Victoria’s Secret store. One guy pulled out a gun and shot someone in the leg.

In urban lingo, shooting someone in the leg is called “leg warming.” It is often a warning about cooperating with police or selling drugs in someone’s else’s territory or even refusing to give someone a pit bull puppy.

The victim’s aunt told a different story to WAVY- TV:

“They were just walking in the mall, and the guys came up to him and wanted to fight DaQuan and his friend,” Towanna Stovall said. “They said, ‘No we got our kids with us.’ They basically said, ‘We don’t care whether you got your kids with you or not, we are going to do this.’ They hit my goddaughter and punched her in the eye. They also jumped on DaQuan and his friend.”

On Twitter, several people said the fight started over a pair of panties. Whatever the reason, black mob violence is a regular feature of life at this mall – and others in the area.

In December, the Military Circle mall and some surrounding businesses closed early after hundreds of black people rampaged through the shopping center fighting, destroying property, creating mayhem.

“Something has to be done to stop the violence,” reported WTKR-TV news:

“Every weekend on Friday and Saturday nights a bunch of juveniles will just swarm the malls, no intentions other than being up to no good, shoplifting, running rampant, getting into fights and just generally driving out the other traffic that comes in the mall because they don’t want to be around that,” said one store manager who did not want to be identified.

Some of the violence was captured on video and posted to YouTube, but viewers need to sign in to verify the their age for viewing the violent content.

Said one shopper to WAVY-TV: “As an African-America, we can do better. … I am embarrassed that this happened.”

Black mobs routinely terrorize cities across the country, but the media and government are silent. Read the detailed account of rampant racial crime in “White Girl Bleed A Lot: The Return of Racial Violence to America and How the Media Ignore It.”

The Norfolk Virginian-Pilot refuses to report that violence at the mall is predominantly among black shoppers. This is the same paper that took almost three weeks last year to report that two of its own newsroom employees were surrounded and beaten by a mob of 50 black people, the same paper that received six awards from National Association of Black Journalists at its annual Salute to Excellence.

The editor said he had no evidence that violence was “racially motivated.” And anyone who suggests that a pattern of black mob violence presents evidence of some kind of racial motivation is not welcome on the pages of the Virginian-Pilot:

“I have seen more posts removed for this reason on this thread than any I remember,” said one reader, even before the Valentine’s Day shootout. “Apparently the Pilot has a problem with posters who tell things as they truly are. I use to drive a mini-bus for a retirement community and many of our residents were scared to death at the mention of going to Military Circle, and it wasn’t because of the prices.”

... according to the data, Koch Industries places 59 on the list with $18 million in donations, 90-percent of which went to Republicans.

So who takes the top spot? An organization called “ActBlue” which bills itself as a PAC “allowing individuals and groups to channel their progressive dollars to candidates and movements of their choosing.”

That group has donated more than 97 million to political causes, with over 99-percent going to Democrats.

So who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Evil Koch Bros? Six of the top 10 are … wait for it … unions. They gave more than $278 million, with most of it going to Democrats.

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Obama abandons the phrase “hard working people.”

Not since the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union has the Left
in this country done such an abrupt 180.
Read the history book and you find that after the Hitler-Stalin pact was
signed, marking the beginning of WW II in Europe, the American Left worked tirelessly
to keep us out of war. Accurately
expressing that view, the old Communist Pete Seeger penned a song with the line

“Franklin
Roosevelt is leading an unwilling people into a J.P. Morgan war.”

Once Hitler
attacked Stalin it was no longer J.P. Morgan’s war; instead the Left demanded
a gun:

“So, Mr. President, we got
this one big job to do, that’s lick Mr. Hitler and when we’re through, let no
one else ever take his place, to trample down the human race, so what I want is
you to give me a gun so we can hurry up and get the job done.”

On February 4th the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that over 2 million people would probably quit working thanks to ObamaCare. It wasn't quite the invasion of Russia, but it was still something of a shock.

It took less than a day for the Left to abandon the idea
that all Americans wanted to be hard-working, even if those who could not find a
job. Instead the new meme is that working Americans are wage
slaves and ObamaCare has freed them from those shackles. Google “Obama hard working people” and you
get 674 million results. But that was
before the CBO report.

Everyone on the Left was
momentarily stunned. But since ObamaCare HAD to survive, the negative had to be turned into a positive. So Jay Carney was trotted out to tell us “what great news!” And that gave the media their direction. A mere week ago the Left asserted that those who were not working were desperately
looking for a job. Today we are told that those same people don’t want to work, don't need to work, in fact they should not work, because they are
living the dream.

Of course the unemployed dream-catchers were all portrayed as sympathetic figures. The single mom able to stay home and care for the children, the elderly
who can now retire, the over-age student who can now pursue his study on a cure
for cancer and the common cold in one little pill. Rush Limbaugh was able to aggregate statements made by many of
the Democrats who hailed the end of work.

Here’s Keith Ellison, (D-MN) on the benefits of not working:

What the Congressional
Budget Office is saying is that we’re gonna discourage kids having to have
latchkey. We’re gonna have parents being able to come home working reasonable
hours. People are gonna be able to retire. People might be able to actually
cook dinner rather than have to order out and get some takeout. Americans work way more than the average of
industrialized countries around the world.
We need a better work-life balance.
Ask a working mother, okay, if she could use a few more hours in a day
to take care of her family.

Now actually, that’s not what the CBO said, or the
reality. When people drop out of the
work force they are not “able to come home at reasonable hours,” they are going
to be home, period. So the image of the
parent working a few hours less and spending time cooking a healthy meal thanks
to ObamaCare is a fantasy. Ellison’s “working
mother” may be a mother, but she’s not working if she drops out as part of the
CBO’s 2 million plus.

E.J. Dionne (D-WaPo) gives us this charming picture of the couple
taking a sabbatical from life:

Just think about the
money put in people's pockets when they're saving on their insurance from
subsidies! Think of two people. We're
supposed to be for family values. You
have a couple where somebody wants to leave the labor force for a couple years
to take care of their kids. Under the
old system, if that person carried the health insurance, they didn't have the
option to leave. Uh, now they can! What you're doing is expanding people's
choices.

Let’s say they do exactly that, and now that the kids are
older they decide to apply for a job Let’s not even ask what they have been living
on for the “couple of years” they've taken off.
Let’s say they are a well-paid professional couple with no mortgage or other
debts and they were living off their savings. They go
to a job interview and explain how they have been spending their time. What are the chances?When you hire someone you want someone who’s
committed to his job, who’s anxious to work, who you can depend on for a long
time. Let’s just say that E. J. Dionne’s
free spirits would be hired in the fast food industry where annual turnover is
100%, but most other employers would look for someone who's more committed to their career.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) also thinks that not working is a great idea;
it’s "freedom":

What CBO said is that
many American workers would have freedom. Now, that's a good word, freedom to
do things that they couldn't do. The single mom who’s raising three kids has to
keep a job ‘cause of health care can now spend some time raising those kids.
That's a family value. The student, 27 years old, wants to finish school
quickly so he can get a great job, can't ‘cause he needs health care, is now
free.

Well, actually health care is not “free” and never has been.
It’s quite expensive. The
question is who’s paying for it. Presumably
not the single mom or the student living the life in Schumer’s world.

But thanks to the Left’s commitment to ObamaCare they are now
firmly embracing the new concept that not working is a “family value” and
staying home is perfectly fine. Which
means that those millions of unemployed are not going to be described as
wanna-be “hard working” any more. That’s apparently no longer a family value. In fact if you spend too much time working to
feed, clothe or house your family you may have a screw loose.

It may take a few weeks or months for the Obama’s speech
writers to take out references to “hard working” Americans from his
teleprompter, but take my word for it, the new minstrels of the Left will tell us:

“So,
Mr. President, we got us some leisure time to take, that’s the end of hard work
for me, and when we’re through, me and my baby momma, we’ll sit in the sun, so
what I want is that ObamaCare application so we can take this job and shove it.”

And Obama will smile because suddenly unemployment is not a bad thing. In fact it's a "family value. " And when his "year of action" on jobs proves to be as big a bust as all his previous jobs plans, the press will tell us that's a good thing.

Tyranny, even the worst tyranny, doesn't come all at once. It is eaten away like a mouse nibbling on a piece of cheese, until suddenly it's all gone. And you are in someone else's power.

Welcome to Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, a country with the fifth largest oil reserves in the world and absolutely broke. It’s a remarkable achievement for Chavismo. A just-wow moment. Socialism is useless at everything except for smashing things in record time. There it excels. It’s hard to imagine that as late as the 1980s Venezuela had the highest standard of living in Latin America. But then in 1960 Detroit was the richest city in the world in per capita income. Now it’s well … Detroit.

Welcome to South America where things are getting worse ... fast.

“Brazil is becoming Argentina, Argentina is becoming Venezuela, and Venezuela is becoming Zimbabwe.” The question that always puzzles historians about the fall of great and rich countries is: ‘why didn’t they say it coming?’ How did they let disaster sneak up on them?

Think about it: Wherever Mrs. Fletcher went, someone ended up dead. Wherever Mr. Obama goes, a part of America gets punched in the face, falls into a coma or dies. Oh, sure, both characters seem nice enough, but inviting either to dinner (or to run the country) portends something disastrous....

Recently, a Reuters report wondered if the Japan-China relationship was “at its worst.” Well, if Mr. Obama’s track record continues, it will be soon.

The White House has announced the president will visit Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines in April. This is like having Mrs. Fletcher over for a banquet. Then asking her to stay the night. Seriously, it’s time to pray for the entire region.

“Make no mistake about it, this was their desired outcome,” Cruz said. “A lot of the Republicans wanted exactly what Barack Obama wanted, exactly what Nancy Pelosi wanted, exactly what Harry Reid wanted, which is to raise the debt ceiling, but they wanted to be able to tell what they view as their foolish, gullible constituents back home they didn’t do it.”

Cruz pointed out that in the weeks before, Republican senators had been saying that they wanted concessions attached to the increase, not the “clean” bill that ended up passing.

“It’s like they think the American people are just a bunch of rubes, that we don’t remember what they say,” Cruz said.

I like Bud Norman; he’s conservative, witty, and a good writer. But like most of us he has a tendency to fool himself on occasion by managing to hold two contradictory ideas in his head at once. In the present instance, Republicans who convinced themselves that capitulating on the debt ceiling would be a small positive for the party hold two contradictory ideas about the voting public. The first is that “A crucial percentage of voters pay too little attention to politics to hear these arguments [about the crushing federal debt], and even if the arguments were to somehow sneak into the news accounts that occasionally interrupt the average uninformed American’s day he would likely be unmoved.”

The reason is that the Democrats in the media will amplify the imaginary horrors of a government shut-down and ramp up talk of a default. And that’s true. But then they believe that “ the majority of Republican congressman who opposed the deal will be able to remind their conservative voters that they at least voted “no.” The Democrats won’t have another unpopular showdown to blame on the Republicans, and they’ll still be remembered as the party that promised you could keep your health care plan if you liked it and then cancelled the policy and forced you to pay more money for one covering things you don’t want or need.”

So come election day those same voters will become astute students of the issues, blame Democrats for all the country’s problems and pull the lever for the Republicans. Oh, and in the meantime, those same voters will be told about the great things that ObamaCare is doing for them, including their new-found ability to break the shackles of work, being able to follow their dreams with government health care, ObamaPhones, SNAP cards and government housing.

I certainly hope that Bud Norman and the Republicans in congress who believe that endless retreat is the way that wars are won are right, but I’m not at all sure that they are. The Russians managed to pull that stunt on Napoleon several centuries ago, but they had the assistance of nature. At the end of the day, you can retreat only so far and then you’re out of both space and time. I’m not persuaded that waiting for the crash will be the beginning of a renewed American Republic. In other times and other places that’s often the time when the proverbial Man on Horseback makes his appearance.

You will not the the Liberals at the national Journal don't take the Constitutional protections against government spying on its citizens without a warrant seriously. They may have screamed bloody murder the George Bush was a war criminal, but the lovable Barack Obama who has doubled down on his policies is not to be feared. So going to court to protect our privacy is now a proper object of ridicule.

Here comes some fun. Sen. Rand Paul will join a lawsuit against President Obama, National Intelligence Director James Clapper, FBI Director James Comey, and NSA Director Keith Alexander. The suit, Paul says, is because Obama "has publicly refused to stop a clear and continuing violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Bill of Rights protects all citizens from general warrants. I expect this case to go all the way to the Supreme Court and I predict the American people will win."

The Kentucky Republican is joining a suit from FreedomWorks President Matt Kibbe. And to just round out the group, the lead counsel is Ken Cuccinelli, former Virginia attorney general and Republican gubernatorial candidate. In the press release from RandPac, Cuccinelli says that "we expect to be opposed by the vast resources of the federal government, yet I am optimistic that we will prevail."

And of course they accuse Paul of not being serious either. It's all a ruse to get a mailing list for donors.

Paul's class-action suit has accrued hundreds of thousands of signatures via his his website, though some have pointed out that the list will likely double as a supporter database for future political aspirations, which may include a run for the White House in 2016.

Perhaps this will inspire many millions more to drop out of the the "prison" that the Left now calls work so that they, along with Obama can have the government pay for everything.

A slab of dry-aged rib eye beef, American caviar and salad representing the first lady's garden will be on the four-course menu for the elegant state dinner being given by President Barack Obama for French President Francois Hollande on Tuesday.

Check on the link to see the pictures. It's the closest you'll get to the new American royal palace.

Guests will take small trolleys across the South Lawn to the tent, which will be transformed into a spring-like scene inspired by Claude Monet's Water Lilies paintings, with quince branches in full bloom, irises, blue agapanthus and lilies.

The White House kept the guest list under wraps, along with who will sit at the head table, but revealed that soul singer Mary J. Blige will perform after the dinner.

The first course will feature caviar harvested from Illinois streams, Pennsylvania quail eggs, and 12 varieties of potatoes, the White House said.

The salad, served in a terrarium-like bowl, includes herbs from the White House kitchen garden, and honey from the White House beehive.

Dry-aged ribeye beef from a farm in Greeley, Colorado, will highlight the main course.

For dessert: Hawaiian chocolate-malted ganache, fudge made from Vermont maple syrup, and puffs of cotton candy dusted with orange zest.

Obama Administration arming every agency. Sees the people as the enemy. Ready to shoot.

The latest purchase further illustrates the fallacy of the DHS’ excuse that it is buying bullets in bulk in order to save money.

The federal agency will pay around $1.20 for each round, when a lower grain round could be acquired for around a quarter of the price.

The DHS has faced questions over the last couple of years as to the purpose of its mass ammo purchases which have totaled over 2 billion bullets, with some fearing the federal agency is gearing up for civil unrest.

The majority of the bullets purchased by the DHS were hollow point rounds (one order alone amounted to 450 million of them). Hollow point bullets just happen to be completely unsuitable for training purposes because they cost significantly more money compared to standard firing range bullets, contradicting claims by the DHS that the bullets were merely for training purposes and were bought in bulk to save money.

Large scale DHS bulk buys have contributed to ammo shortages across the country. In April last year, the Government Accountability Office announced that it would be investigating the issue, although no follow up has been forthcoming.

Jesus Ernesto Chavez Castillo, a star witness in the murder trial of Arturo Gallegos Castrellon, told jurors in an El Paso federal courtroom how the Barrio Azteca Gang Catrellon grew from a Texas jail gang into contract killers for the notorious Juarez cartel. Thousands of murders committed by the gang over a four-year period helped Juarez earn the dubious title of "Murder Capital of the World."

Chavez testified he stopped counting the number of people he killed at 800, and said he often beheaded and dismembered victims to impress his boss. The idea was "that it would be big news," he said.

These are the kind of people that the Obama administration armed with American guns during operation Fast and Furious.

An Arizona woman jumped from the second-floor bedroom of a 15-year-old boy after his mother caught her cavorting naked with the teen last month, investigators report.

Keri Gonzalez, 34, broke her ankle when she crashed to the ground outside the residence in Marana, a town 30 miles northwest of Tucson.

According to the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office, Gonzalez snuck into the home after the boy’s mother fell asleep. The boy said that he and Gonzalez consumed alcohol she had brought to the home, and “had sex twice that evening” before his mother caught them in bed, deputies reported.

Tuesday, February 11, 2014

Being human, politicians lie. Even in the best regimes. The distinguishing feature of totalitarian regimes however, is that they are built on words that the rulers know to be false, and on somehow constraining the people to speak and act as if the lies were true. Thus the people hold up the regime by partnering in its lies. Thus, when we use language that is “politically correct” – when we speak words acceptable to the regime even if unfaithful to reality – or when we don’t call out politicians who lie to our faces, we take part in degrading America.

The case in point is Television personality Bill O’Reilly who, in his pre-Super Bowl interview with Barack Obama, suffered the President to tell him – and his audience of millions – that the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups had been a minor “bonehead” mistake in the Cincinnati office, because there is “not even a smidgen of corruption” in that agency. O’ Reilly knew but did not say that both he and the President know this to be a lie, that the key official in the affair, Lois Lerner, had made sure that the IRS’s decision on how to treat the Tea Party matter would be made in Washington by writing: that the matter was “very dangerous” and that “Cincy should probably NOT have these cases.”

O’ Reilly did not call out the lie. Nor did he just remain silent. Rather, he said of Obama that: “his heart is in the right place.”

I have written in this space: “Obama’s premeditated, repeated, nationally televised lies… are integral, indeed essential, to his presidency and to the workings of the US government.” They are neither innocent opinions nor mistakes. Rather, they grab for power by daring the listener to call them what they are. Failure to do so, never mind gratuitously granting them bona fides, is redefining our regime.

...

How, for example, is one to react to the White House’s explanation for the Congressional Budget Office’s projection that Obamacare will reduce the number of full-time workers in America by some 2.5 million over the next decade? CBO says the law will do this by “creating an implicit tax on additional earnings” – in other words in-kind bonus for unemployment. But the White House, echoed by the New York Times, says that this is a good thing because it will free people, young and old, to pursue careers or retirement without having to worry about health coverage.

This is the sort of thing that one expects from the North Korean regime, explaining that the latest cut in food rations will free people from the tyranny of having to eat more than once a day, or as I heard on Cuban TV in 1969, that the government had cut the meat ration because its scientists had discovered that eating meat causes cancer. One can no more take such things as sincere expressions of mistaken opinions than anyone, Bill O’Reilly foremost, could legitimately take Obama’s statement that the IRS’ targeting of conservatives was a “bonehead mistake” by low level officials in Cincinnati.

Why then do we not call lies lies, and liars liars? Because there are consequences. Had O’Reilly told Obama something like “You know that this is false. You are insulting me by lying to my face. What makes you think that I, or any other American would stand for that?” he would have been ostracized by the Establishment – and lost his prized access to the White House.

For ordinary Americans, calling the regime’s lies by their name, deviating from political correctness, carries far stiffer penalties, because the regime has labeled each such deviation as an antisocial pathology: racism, sexism, homophobia, islamophobia, “denialism,”etc., any of which mark you as an opponent of those who count. They may fire you, pass you over, or just exclude you from that to which you wish to be included.

This is new and incomplete. But only in America. It is the very routine, the very constitution, of totalitarian society. Returning our attention to the indissoluble link between truth and freedom, lies and servitude, was the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s enduring contribution to our civilization.

Solzhenitsyn showed that totalitarianism works by leading people to take part in the regime’s lies, and that it does so mostly by a host of petty incentives. Then he wrote: “the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here: Personal non-participation in lies. Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, but not with any help from me.” The lies that hold up corrupt regimes, he noted, like infections, “can exist only in a living organism.” Hence whoever will live in freedom “will immediately walk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.”

Now that the full court press to refute the findings of the CBO report which, as we reported, confirmed what was largely known – that as a result of Obamacare, the strapped US economy will have even fewer workers as millions will fall back on welfare state entitlements which make hard work obsolete – has failed, it is time for the propaganda to take a different track: one where not having a job, and in fact losing it due to Obamacare, is hailed as an act of nobility. Sure enough, here comes one of the administration’s favorites, the Bezos Times, with “They quit their jobs, thanks to health-care law” which does largely as its name suggests: highlights just how “enabling” and “liberating” Obamacare is for one’s life, once a person is no longer burdened by something as trivial as a job.

* * * * * *

Of course, it is up to the likes of the Bezos Washington Post to make it appear that this is all not only perfectly normal, but noble and dignified.

Alas, as smarter people than us have pointed out, being untethered and unleashed only works as long as the system has other people’s money to distribute to those who chose not to work and pay taxes. Once said money runs out , complete social collapse and revolution usually follows.

Monday, February 10, 2014

Among its many stamps, the Postal Service has a series called “Made in America, Building a Nation.” The strip of “forever” stamps is a collection of iconic photographs of 20th-century industry featuring men and women toiling on railroads, skyscrapers and factory floors.

A celebration of work and workers, the series quotes Helen Keller saying, “The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.”

My, oh, my, how times have changed. America now has a government that views work as a trap and celebrates those who escape it.

People who are not dependent of government hand-outs are harder to control.

All true and yet, as Carney’s defense showed, something much, much larger is at play. The impacts are symptoms. The disease is that leading Democrats view fewer workers and more dependency as a good thing. That attitude largely explains slow economic growth, record-low labor rates and the explosion of handouts over the last five years.

This anti-job, pro-dependency tilt is the crux of the nation’s polarization. In essence, it pits those who believe in the sanctity of work against those who believe in penalizing wealth and redistributing its fruits.

Not all Democrats agree with that approach, but the party is now controlled by those who do. It is the party that celebrates subsidies and rewards states for getting more people on food stamps. It opens the door wider for disability payments and fights for unemployment benefits like it once fought for jobs. It does these things not because of an emergency but because of a warped ideology.